OVER ME YOU CAST A SPELL KAREN DAVID Handcuffs knew it was special. It knew it was not an ordinary set of handcuffs. Within its steel frame it knew it. Within its links and slots and ridges and twists it felt it. Conceived of by a great illusionist to perform even greater feats of escape. With such drama. Always drama. Always theatre! Spectacle! Ah. The memories it held and replayed over and over. Long before it was made, Handcuffs was a but a spark of an idea in the racing mind of a young boy 1 (because don’t we exist as ideas before we exist as material?), who by the age of 17 had run away from home, performed as a trapeze artist, and begun a career in stage magic. 2 Handcuffs, a bright twinkle in the eye of its conceiver, until a necessity for realising it as an object would forge it into being. The young boy now a young man met the love of his life.3 They would become partners in every sense; marriage, work and secret codes.4 Bess was her name and Handcuffs adored her. Adored her reassuring touch as she placed Handcuffs on the young man as he submerged himself in locked vaults, felt the man’s skin goosebump in the cold water, adored her saltwater tears as she cried for his death.5 Handcuffs was there when they swore their secret code “Rosabelle Believe”6 and was there when the charlatans7 would trick her into believing that it was her love that truly spoke from the grave.8 Handcuffs was here still today, locked away safely in a dusty cabinet in a museum for the young man,9 in a swirling mist of memories, waiting for its own true love, Key, to return and together embrace once more.
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